The painting


One day as I was feeling the lines of my existence under my fingers, trying so doing to identify one of them through to an escape out of the mazes in the middle of which I found myself unwillingly lost, an idea to realize a painting crossed my mind in the hope to dump some of my feelings and thoughts in it.
Everything around me was just round repetitive chaos where things come back again from where they parted as if they insisted on besieging me until I suffocate or else explode.
The colours were before me on a wooden table. As my fingers picked up the brush, the wild and void whiteness bewildered me, it was challenging me firmly towards victory. I felt a slight quivering, and the brush accidentally touched the board where a black dot showed afterwards.
It didn’t fill a big surface on the whiteness as it was just like a tiny hole. I contemplated it just for a while when it rapidly began moving and expanding its roundness. Luminous radiations were then pouring out of it of which the luminosity was intensified for a while until I fancied that the hole put on all colours.
I slightly rubbed my eyes and contemplated it over again, and at a certain time, somehow, I imagined that it turned into a line. ‘This is just normal’, I said to myself, for the line is but a path from the dot. Isn’t it the beginning which we choose, and so explodes the illumination which encourages us towards enterprise? So are our things always in need for a line to constrict our voids as if we apprehend wandering or getting lost.
Eating, sleeping, playing and working as well as building, behaviour… all are in need of a line, of a framework, of borders to constrict the void. The line of advance is defined; it turns into a basis / a beginning, without our being conscious that it is the end. Isn’t the line an edge, an illumination which guides our vision and thoughts and behaviour throughout both our departures and returns? Aren’t all kinds of forms accordingly produced, the square and the rectangle, the circle as well…?
I recalled one of my friends who once told me: Enough uprightness!
I smiled because I was suddenly conscious that behind his words stood a whole architecture of life.
To be upright means that you are obliged, and perhaps equilibrated and straight but having a character that is inclined to acuteness and potency.
I asked myself: Aren’t these all male characters? But, uprightness, doesn’t it turn into dryness and boredom?
In masonry too, whenever a building is made just of mere straight lines, so towering, solid, and sharp it will be and also so boring and lacking of beauty.
My dot moved again and irregular lines formed, I tried to contemplate them. I felt perplex and dizzy as if I were light-headed. This reminded me of one of my friends as of when he sat beside me when we were participating in a seminar proceeding.
This friend crammed his papers with random and disarrayed lines. When I asked him what he was doing, he said:
I can’t get along with such complex subjects, I feel an intellectual banality, I am mentally disoriented.
My look got back to the painting again, my dot had got new paths, I noticed its movement this time, it was of more stillness and fluidity. I fancied it a ballet female dancer while it was drawing its curved lines. I felt it was free and unbelievably supple, as if it were practicing what resembles an optical game according to the cadencies of a silent music.
I didn’t know when I surprised myself seeing it in the form of dunes, fancying female bodies lying on a silk carpet under the rays of a huge and flaming sun.
It is one of those mad moments which break through man, which break through the dimensions of the thought just like water when it penetrates the sand in the deserts.
Again I asked myself: could the straight line be parallel or crossing a curved one? Perhaps will it be the very moment of the separation between things, or of their unity, or else of their emergence, or of the incursion of sadness in the heart and the predominance of pain over every existing thing.
The door of my room was suddenly pushed open, my son entered smiling, but when he looked at the painting and saw its scattered lines in all directions, he frowned at me and said:
Do you think yourself a plastic artist?!
When I was about to answer him and talk to him about the dot which is the beginning and the end of everything, he turned away and shut the door of the room behind him.
I could do nothing else then but to put a dot to mark the end of this text when the dot took big dimensions like a well inside which I fell.
And then, there was nothing else but... Silence.

Translation :
Allal Ferri